The collection ‘England and the Netherlands: the ties between two nations’ includes some 200 items, including about 2,000 images, and centres on the following four themes:

Rivalry between two trading nations
Documents illustrating the relations between two ambitious seafaring nations which regularly ‘collided’ with each other. For instance in the East Indies, where fierce competition raged between them, both countries wanting to control the profitable trade in cloves. This part of the collection includes the pamphlets concerning the so-called Ambon murder in 1623: the execution on the island of Ambon of ten Englishmen and their alleged Japanese accomplices. They had been accused by the local Dutch administrators of having conspired to overthrow Dutch rule. They were condemned and executed after having confessed under the duress of torture. Had the case been fairly tried or was the execution a judicial murder? This affair was to go on stirring up feelings for about two centuries.

Eyewitnesses
A collection of travel reports and diaries written by English visitors to the Netherlands and Dutch visitors to England. They throw an interesting light on what people on one side of the North Sea thought of their neighbours on the opposite side and what a sightseeing tour or a business trip was like in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The selection includes texts and images (townscapes, everyday scenes, cartoons, traditional costumes and maps) taken from handwritten as well as printed diaries, travellers’ journals, pamphlets, almanacs and related items.

The Great Fire of London
After having been stricken by the plague, the greater part of the city of London was reduced to ashes in 1666. The Dutch were dismayed when they heard the news, but since England and the Netherlands happened to be at war at the time and the English had just created a bloodbath on the Dutch island of Terschelling, many people thought they had brought the catastrophe upon themselves and that the fire was God’s just punishment.

William III, the King-Stadholder
There was a time when a Dutchman sat on the English throne! In 1677, William III married his first cousin Mary II Stuart, thereby further strengthening the already existing ties with the Scottish House of Stuart House, from which his mother descended as well. In 1689, William and his wife Mary were asked to become King and Queen of England in order to prevent the Roman Catholic James II from ascending the throne. This event is known as the Glorious Revolution.

Transcriptions
Some of the collection items are printed in Gothic characters, which we find difficult to read nowadays. There are also a number of handwritten documents to which the same applies. Besides being on view in the original, every such item is accompanied by a transcription that is easy to read… and to do a search in.

Because the originals are always available for viewing, the transcribers chose to let legibility and accessibility prevail over an exact rendition of the original. The following rules were applied to the transcription:

• The modern notations “u” and “j” were applied to “v” and “i” respectively (e.g. “trve” was transcribed as “true” and “vnivst” as “unjust”), whilst “w” was transcribed as “uu” (e.g. “wt” became “uut”) and “vv” as “w” (e.g. “vvaer” became “waer”.
• In English, “ye” was transcribed as “the”.
• Capital letters were replaced by small letters except where capital letters would have been used in modern English or Dutch as well.
• For the sake of legibility, the punctuation of handwritten texts was adjusted in some places.
• Whenever possible, abbreviations were rendered in full.
• Spelling mistakes and printers’ errors were occasionally corrected.
• In a few cases, explanatory remarks were added between square brackets.